Iorworth Hoare Deserves His Lottery Winnings

[Updates below.]

Associated Press via CNN: Outrage over rapist's lottery win

British Home Secretary David Blunkett said Thursday he plans to bar convicted felons from benefiting from financial windfalls while behind bars after a jailed rapist won £7 million ($12.6 million) on the national lottery.

Blunkett said that proposed legislation before parliament would force offenders who won the lottery or other wealthy criminals to contribute to a compensation fund for victims of crime.

What is justice? Dictionary.com defines it as:

1. The quality of being just; fairness.
   
2. 1. The principle of moral rightness; equity.
      
   2. Conformity to moral rightness in action or attitude; righteousness.
   
   
3. 1. The upholding of what is just, especially fair treatment and due reward in accordance with honor, standards, or law.
      
   2. Law. The administration and procedure of law.
   
   
4. Conformity to truth, fact, or sound reason: The overcharged customer was angry, and with justice.

People conceive of justice as being roughly "getting what you deserve" and "being given what you are owed."

His comments follow public outrage in Britain over the lottery win of convicted rapist Iorworth Hoare, who was on day release from his low-security prison when he bought the winning ticket on Saturday.

"There's no justice in a convicted rapist winning the lottery while his victims still suffer from what he did to them," Blunkett wrote in The Sun newspaper.

"We can't stop a prisoner or their family from buying a ticket, but we can look closely at making sure they don't benefit from a single penny while in prison," he added.

I disagree with the outrage and with Mr. Blunkett. The purpose of the criminal justice system is to mete out punishment to offenders and reform them to never do crime again. I don't necessarily agree with that, but that isn't important at this time.

What these people are saying is the justice system isn't doing it's job. It isn't punishing criminals enough. The sentence handed down doesn't meet their standards of justice. Therefore, criminals need to be punished for the rest of their lives. Thus, we have things like sex offender registration lists.

Mr. Hoare earned that lottery money the very same way every other legitimate lottery winner earned that money: through the voluntary purchase of a ticket with the hope it may win. That act alone doesn't entitle anyone else to his wealth.

Hoare was jailed between 1973 and 1987 for a series of sex attacks on women. He was returned to prison in 1989 for attempting to rape a 60-year-old woman in a park.

Assuming his convictions are valid, I'm not standing up for his crimes and his actions. He's an ugly violator of rights and his victims deserve restitution. But does his prison sentence serve that purpose?

Prison officials said Hoare has been moved to a closed prison following his lottery win for his safety.

Neil Sugarman, a lawyer specializing in personal injury and compensation claims, said some of Hoare's victims may be able to claim a share of his newfound wealth.

"The biggest difficulty any claimant will face is the limitation periods, and generally speaking ... you are looking at three years," Sugarman said.

"But someone assaulted before that period may be able to say they didn't take any action at the time because the offender had no money."

Copyright 2004 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.

In that sense, I can agree that if he was unable to pay his victims for the damage he caused, he owes them a debt. Of course, all this assumes the money from the lottery and the lottery itself isn't tied to the state.

Guardian: Rapist serving life term wins lottery £7m

A prisoner serving life for attempted rape has won £7m in the national lottery.

Iorworth Hoare, 52, was jailed for life at Leeds crown court in 1989. He was on temporary release from a Middlesbrough bail hostel when his numbers came up in last Saturday's Lotto Extra draw.

Hoare, formerly of Seacroft Gate, Leeds, was convicted of attempting to rape a 60-year-old woman in a park in the city, after a series of crimes that included one rape, two attempted rapes and three indecent assaults.

According to the Sun, Hoare began a series of sex attacks while he was still in his 20s and was sentenced to a total of 18 years between 1973 and 1987.

Home Office guidelines allow prisoners in open conditions - such as day release or community projects - to take part in the lottery and claim any prize they may win.

Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2004

If I'm getting this correctly, the only reason there is uproar is because he's an egregious offender and few if any prisoners have won the lottery while in jail. Those are flimsy grounds for such condemnation.

The man has already lost his freedom to the prison system. People should not be so flippant about dismissing such a change. I have a friend who works in the Travis County State Jail and the stories he tells are frightening. Getting jailed for a month would be unreal. Being locked up for the rest of your years (and Mr. Hoare has just under half his life ahead of him) is something I can't conceive of.

It isn't justice to continue punishing criminals after they've been handed their "justice." As Roy Childs said in The Epistemological Basis of Anarchism:

A man, by an act of aggression, causes a value-loss in his victim (i.e., he causes him to lose some state of being which he saw as beneficial to himself, some rank on his value hierarchy). By his act of aggression, then, the aggressor creates a debt which he owes and must pay to his victim. "Justice demands that the aggressor who causes the loss, damage, or destruction of an innocent man's values pay for his aggression by repaying the victim for his loss, plus all reasonable expenses directly occasioned by the aggression (such as apprehending the aggressor. Furthermore, the aggressor owes a specific amount which can be objectively determined, and he owes no more than that amount (if this were not true, there could be no justice). To make him pay more than he owes (as punishment - 'to teach him a lesson') is an act of injustice. An aggressor owes no more than the debt he has created by his irrational actions." (From Morris and Linda Tannehill's Liberty via the Market, p. 7. Emphases in original.)

This is, basically, the principle of objective justice in retaliation. The purpose of retaliation is to repay the victim for the loss suffered. Now, there is an immense difficulty in applying this principle to certain contexts - granted. But the problem exists in every other realm as well, and is an epistemological difficulty (i.e., "How do we know?"). The standard by which one judges what is owed is an objective one; that is, it is determined by the nature of reality. The standard is, simply, the contextual hierarchy of values of the victim when the aggression took place - for all losses are value losses, and there is no way to "measure" values outside the context and hierarchy in which they exist. As all acts of aggression are against individual people, it is only individual men who are harmed and suffer loss. Those who were not harmed by the act of aggression can have no concern in retaliating, with two exceptions: (1) if the aggressor shows by a pattern of behavior that he is a real threat to those others not yet involved, they are justified in stopping him, and (2) since the victim possesses the right of self-defense and retaliation, he can delegate his authority to judge and act (his "right" to self-defense and retaliation, in a sense) to representatives or agents, who may then properly act on his behalf. At any time, of course, other people may impose any other sanctions against the criminal they wish, since they must judge with whom to deal. There is of course an immense problem here when we are considering the problem of the destruction of an irreplaceable value, such as a human life. But this is outside the scope of this paper, and it does not in any sense negate the validity of the general principle in question.

Emphasis in the original.

Iorworth Hoare's property is his. If people actually wanted justice, they'd free him on the condition he gave his winnings to his victims.

UPDATED 9/30/2005 12:35pm
BBC: Lotto rapist case to be reviewed

The case of a millionaire rapist living in the community under a publicly funded scheme will be reviewed by Home Secretary Charles Clarke.

The Sun newspaper said the government has spent £10,000 a month to protect the identity of Iorworth Hoare, 52, since his release in March.

Mr Clarke said he would study the case and the "broader issues" raised.

Hoare, from Leeds but said by the Sun to be living in Sunderland, won £7m on Lotto Extra while on temporary release.

How about the "broader issue" of forcing anyone to pay for the protection of criminals? Mr. Hoare's case is merely an egregious example of what happens every day, folks. The fact that he's a lottery winner and can afford to pay for these kinds of costs doesn't make it fundamentally different than a rapist without such winnings.

Posted by Drizzten at August 12, 2004 02:11 PM